best storage/backup system

[Koal.T]

Hi,

I recently suffered 2 HDD crashes within a few days on my RAID1 system, meaning I lost all of my data I had done in the last few weeks, bar my email and anything I had copied to CD about 2 weeks before. This was a 2x 80Gb Maxtor RAID1 setup, and had been going strong for a few years probably with no problems. I was just unlucky!

I have been looking around for a way to create the 'ultimate' home backup system, that isn't too pricey, but can have a lot more protection of my files.

I was looking into purchasing 3x 160Gb and a RAID5 system, but I saw if 2 drives fail at the same time, you loose everything on one or two of the drives.

I was also looking into perhaps combining that with Tape Backups. I know tape systems are expensive, but I thought a second hand tape-drive off ebay with some new tapes might do the trick.

Doing bi-nightly backups onto tape and then swapping them with the tapes I can store at work mean that at worst, I could lose 4 days of data. What type of tape types do I want? I have heard of DAT and more, and I want to store 160Gb at least on each tape, without the tapes costing £100's each! Is it more sensible to put a DVD-RW drive into my fileserver (the system running raid1 at the moment) and have it backup some of the data onto a DVD-RW nightly? How much would I be able to fit onto the biggest DVD-RW you can buy? Dual-layer?

Perhaps another option is a cheap old PC or perhaps a Shuttle PC, with a 20Gb system drive and a 160Gb drive located at the opposite site of my house with some batch files to update it nightly is the best option. Is it easier to do progressive backups or complete ones? Or a mixture of both.

An insight into your ideas would be awsome, I haven't got the time or money to try lots of different ideas, so I need some info that will help me decide. I don't want to pay lots of money either, so its one of those triangle things (redundancy, quantity/speed and money - which two are the most important?)...

Thanks,
Koal

[elroy]

After a recent drive crash I installed an extra 80gb drive for backup. I re-installed Windows and then copied the o/s and basic programs to a hidden partition on the 80gb drive. So if Windows fails I have a quick replacement. Then I use Back2Zip to backup all important folders to the other partition on the 80gb drive. The initial backup takes a little while but after that it only backs up changes and takes about 5 minutes. It has manual and scheduled backup capabilities. For a basic home backup system it works well and covers all my needs. I knew if I went with a cdrw/dvd backup I probably wouldn't do it regularly and the best system in the world is useless if it isn't used.

Back2Zip
http://avatarsoft.com/free/simpleser...40059157122954

[PresterJohn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve R Jones

Burning to DVD would be much better than a slow tape drive.

you have got to be kidding! i dunno what decade(?!) you last used a tape drive, but any recent vintage tape unit mounted locally is much faster than the fastest DVD burner.

Koal,

there are a number of different ways & media to backup to.

we would need to know what type of data protection is needed (for ex. would you need to restore a file that was modified on a particular date), how often you needed to backup, and the amount of data which was to backed up each time.

tape backup is fairly expensive (particularly if you need high capacity tapes) but is the best choice if you wanted to store off-site and you needed generation backups.

optical backup is slow and not usually recommended unless the amount of data changed is very little and your backup frequency is low. it would be an excellent choice for archiving stuff on a permanent basis...

backup to a second machine would probably be the most cost effective way if you didn't need any special recovery needs (see conditions mentioned above under tape) and you had a spare PC lying around.

raid is good if you need minimal downtime but it does have some element of risk (ie. a power surge can potentially destroy the machine and/or the disk susbsystem).

[Koal.T]

hi,

thats what I was thinking, PresterJohn. Raid has the problem of if your PC burns down/stolen you still loose everything.

I want to basically backup my work and emails on the network every week at the longest. I actually forgot to say I am currently using SME Server, which was creating my raid array for me (read the docs if you want to know more about that).

I would therefore not mind buying a cheapish raid card to expand the ide ports on the system. I usually change about 150 files a day, and need everything I've ever done backed up, if you know what I mean. Although I rarely change files older than a year or two.

I would obviously want to be able to restore the files in the event of a HDD crash, but normally not a single file.

SME server is based on RedHat 7.3 I think, and it has automatic support for backing up to tape. However the reason I mentioned CD-RW/DVD-RW, is I'm sure you can backup using the 'cdrecord' shell command so we could script it to backup nightly, etc....

thanks for your inputs so far guys...

[PresterJohn]

hmmm...you still haven't provided much detail about your situation, ie. how much data (in mb/gb) do you expect to change on a nightly basis and how far back do you need to retain said data.

>and need everything I've ever done backed up, if you know what I mean.

if instance, if you modify a file or a set of files frequently, and you discovered that you needed those same files restored for a certain data some time ago (say 2 months ago), you backup solution would should probably to be either tape or optical.

and as you discovered, running raid is *not* data backup...all it is, and all it was meant for, is fault tolerance.

[Koal.T]

ok, well I often modify somewhere in the region of 50-150Mb a day on some days, and others it might be only 5Mb or 5Gb. It is very fluid for me.

I'd like to keep backups of about a month ago, so perhaps a 4 week rotation, with weekly backups onto tape or optical..... I could even compress some stuff to fit more onto a tape..

[MegalosSkylaki]

Well you could get one of thoseTray gismos that fit in a 5.5 bay that they sell at www.compgeeks.com for about $8 and load it with a large capacity HDD. Replace just the tray withanother HDD when it's full. But so long as an HD is in the Computer, I'd think it was at some risk.

Do do the same think with one of those $35-50 External enclosures and keep replacing the HDDs. Keeping them off-site I think would be a good idea, if you have a safe place to deposit them.

I wonder if the Iomega Rev concept of replacing the plates of an HDD in a seperate unit from the driveworks --Now about $400 including both --will ever become economical. And whether the Disk-like Rev inserts will be safe from dust etc.

Basically, it boils down to what kind of risk you are willing to live with.

And your wallet. I've seen Terabyte storage units for more than $1000.

Ah! then there is the Blue-lite DVD allegedly coming soon with mucho capacity DVDs.

DOOOG

[John Prophet]

why not just have another computer networked together with yours and use it for backup?

a simple batch file could send the pertinant data to the backup machine and it would just take a few minutes every day